Are human impacts like a hammer and biological systems a nail?

What are the problems with this analogy? (brainstorm with a partner)

• Hammer strikes have different characteristics
  • Global change stressors can vary in magnitude, velocity, etc.

• Nails have different characteristics
  • Organisms vary in their vulnerability to global change stressors

• Also… the nail can influence the hammer
  • Living things can respond to global change stressors and affect the entire system

Organisms have different elements of “vulnerability”

• As human populations continue to rise, so do the pressures placed in natural systems

• How do biological systems respond to human impacts on planet Earth?

• Confronted with a changing world, what can organisms do?

• What we will consider in Unit II is: WHAT IS POSSIBLE?

• Theory proposes that biological systems are able to morph into more complex systems by making incremental, relatively less energy consuming changes in their make up
  • small steps rather than extreme jumps or more distant possibilities

• Kauffman was particularly interested in the origins of order and the mechanisms that drive self-organization, via evolution
  • how the actual expands into the adjacent possible

How the actual expands into the adjacent possible

• The actual describes the system in its current state, with all its components and interconnections

• The adjacent possible contains the set of possibilities available to individuals, communities, institutions, organisms, productive processes, etc., at a given point in time during their evolutions

In physical space -> move

In physiological / behavioral space -> adjust

In genetic / adaptive space -> adapt

If no adjacent possible -> die

Responses are not mutually exclusive

If environmental conditions are changing…
what are the adjacent possible options for survival?

• What determines the adjacent possible?
  • Organisms traits
    • developmental, physical, behavioral
  • Environmental features
  • Dynamics of change
  • etc.

• Begins after last glacial period, including glacial retreat
  • Earth experienced a warming trend

• Climate change and megafauna extinction drive massive change in human behaviors

• Rapid proliferation, growth and impacts of the human species worldwide

• Significant advancements in technology and ‘urbanization’
  • resultant increases in human impacts

• Set of developments that appeared in several places independently!

• Development of agricultural crucial human landmark
  • plant cultivation and animals domestication
  • spread from several centers of origin

• Origin of agriculture… necessity or opportunity?

• Whether from migrating farmers or indigenous development, most continents were transformed

• Economic and social organization that began around 1760 in Great Britain
  • factors of production (trade, farming, natural resources) allowed it to happen

• Replacement of hand tools with power-driven machines
  • power loom, steam engine, iron making

• Concentration of industry in large establishments
  • fueled by coal mining
  • creation of ‘factories’

• Every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way

• Average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth
  • creation of middle class

• Represents the starting point for serious atmospheric change
  • based on fossil fuel emissions

• New geologic era?
  • proposal submitted
  • would mark end of the Holocene

• Many geologist criticize the idea
  • hard to define a period when you are in it

• Interval of time where humans dominate key processes on Earth
  • anthropo, for “man,” and cene, for “new”

• Dramatic, continuous surge in growth rate across a large range of measures of human activity

• Socioeconomic parameters: population, economics, water usage, food production, transportation, technology

• Earth system parameters: green house gases, surface temperature, and natural resource usage

• Post-war revival age
  • fossil energy and new technology flooding the markets